Copyright of images on website

[madmaxpower]

Hi relative newbie here,

I have a question about image copyright.

On my website i have an images which i pulled off the web.
I didn't take these images and who ever did has no idea I am using them,

What issues am i likely to run into.

Another set of images i have are covers of different books and periodicals from many years ago. which I did take but the images are the covers of various publications.

Some of the people working with me are concerned that we could be letting ourselves in for some serious copyright issues.

The question.

In reality what legal trouble could we get in.

I have seen images of various people in the public eye photoshoped into some ugly postions, do they get into legal trouble.

If i use a picture of Brian Cowen in an article I am writing about him, could that lead to legal issues.

Thanks
Max

 

[mneylon]

Simple answer - unless the images were released under a creative commons type license of you have explicit permission to use them then you have no right to use them.

 

[achieve]

A client of mine provided me with some images for a website a number of years back. I did not realise where the images came from, and had used one of these in a collage / banner. 3 years later, and one year after this site had been taken down, this client recieved a bill of €2,000 for breach of copyright. Be very careful!

 

[Kieran]

I agree with Blacknight and you should either of two things with images. Pay for them from a stock photography site or make sure that they are creative commons. For instance even the Stock Photo site stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site has a disclaimer on their site stock.xchng - site info saying that they cannot be held responsible for any copyright violations, despite loudly proclaiming that they are a free stock web photo site. They are now owned by Getty which brings me onto another topic.

Getty run a bot which trawls the Internet looking for images that are 'owned' by them. They have been know to make extortionate claims of website owners for fees for payment for these images up to 1000 Euro per images. I know a website designer (cough, cough) who received such a note and he (the intelligent, trustworthy lad that he was) basically told them (truthfully by the way) that he had no recollection of the source of such an image and he removed it straight away. Getty still pursued the poor innocent lad but he is now ignoring them and has told the website owner to ignore them as well.

So be careful out there.

 

[link8r]

Hi relative newbie here,

I have a question about image copyright.
On my website i have an images which i pulled off the web.
I didn't take these images and who ever did has no idea I am using them,

What issues am i likely to run into.

Another set of images i have are covers of different books and periodicals from many years ago. which I did take but the images are the covers of various publications.

Some of the people working with me are concerned that we could be letting ourselves in for some serious copyright issues.

The question. In reality what legal trouble could we get in.

I have seen images of various people in the public eye photoshoped into some ugly postions, do they get into legal trouble.

If i use a picture of Brian Cowen in an article I am writing about him, could that lead to legal issues.

Thanks
Max

The second part of your question reads "Well other people are doing x, y and z and that's worse". That doesn't help really - if you're guilty of copyright/IP infringement - then you're guilty.

You're confusing a number of points. The person in the photo isn't always the owner of the photo. If the photo is taken in public, the photographer technically owns the photograph. Even if its a picture of the Pope, the Taoiseach. Only minors are protected in Public. So, you can't just take a picture of a public or private person and use it.

The other issue you've entangled into one question is that if you publish something that is considered by the subject to be in anyway libelous, damaging, untrue (unprovable is also considered untrue) - then copyright infractions aside, you'll be opening another can of worms.

Photo's of Brian Cowen are available from the Governments website - they have a PR section with images (well they used to)
Department of Taoiseach - Biography of the Taoiseach, Mr. Brian Cowen, T.D.